Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  One day Mum caught me slumming with Ring, leaving the ends off words, saying ‘Mmmmm’ with the appropriate intonation rather than ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. She gave me stick. ‘You are not to talk to Ring like that. It’s fine for Ring, but Ring is Ring and you are you. You couldn’t live with people like that. Not really.’

  Then one day in the village, with Mum pushing the Tan-Sad, we saw Ring and her young son Graham, which for some reason Ring pronounced ‘Grarm’. They didn’t see us, so we shadowed them for quite a while. It felt strange to be spying on her like that, but it was a treat for me not to be noticed. Suddenly Ring told Grarm off and then whacked him. In fact she whacked him first, saying ‘Take that!’, and told him off afterwards. The whacking was just to get his attention. Then she marched him off, still howling. For the first time I saw the draw-back of expressing your impulses without restraint.

  Mum was shrewd enough to capitalise on my shock. ‘That’s what happens with some people. If that was me, I’d have said, “John, darling, I have asked you more than once not to do that …”’ I didn’t say I’d rather be whacked and have done with it. I couldn’t fetch the words up in all sincerity.

  According to Mum the danger and the problem wasn’t with the working class, though, it was with suburban people and the nouveaux riches. The Delamare family who lived nearby were a good case in point. ‘I’m not fooled by the French veneer for one minute,’ said Mum. ‘Their very name is a trick to make you think they’re upper when they are most certainly not.’ It was Suburbans who felt uncomfortable with the working class, since that was where they had come from so recently.

  Mum said that with each month that passed, it was getting harder to tell who was who. Many suburban people were intelligent, and some of them were even ‘nice’. They were getting university degrees, moving into schools and hospitals and working out the rates on your house. They weren’t dunces. In fact Suburbans tended to have extremely high IQs, and they adapted very quickly. More than anything they wanted to be thought of as Uppers. They would go to any lengths to achieve that imposture.

  However, upper people mustn’t despair. There were secrets that would always elude Suburbans. At this point Mum reverently led me to the tabernacle of her particular cult, her stationery box. She put it on the table, tapping it with a proud finger. This was what decent people stood for. This was pure embossed justification. She opened the lid.

  ‘Just take a look at our printed notepaper, JJ,’ she said, pulling out a sheet. ‘Some things can’t be counterfeited.’ I did as I was told. Our printed notepaper had the address on the right-hand side with a downwards slope:

  Trees,

  Abbotsbrook,

  Bourne End,

  Bucks.

  I already felt a little let down by that fourth line. Bucks? Why were we being so shy about the full glory of our home county? Returning from one of our first trips in the Vauxhall, I was sure I had spotted a signpost as we crossed the border which announced ‘The Royal County of Buckinghamshire’. ‘Why can’t we put that on all our letters,’ I asked, ‘and make everyone who writes to us put it on the envelope?’ I must have been taking time off from my anti-monarchism that day.

  I argued and argued. ‘Why not? Why can’t we? We can if we want to!’ I was only silenced by Mum shouting, ‘Well we just can’t and that’s all there is to it.’ I went into the deepest possible sulk for some time after that. Again I discovered that the best way to undermine an idea was not to oppose it but to put your heart and soul into endorsing it.

  In fact my eyes had deceived me, hardly surprisingly considering my awkward position in the car and my restricted ability to turn my head. It turned out that Buckinghamshire wasn’t the Royal County. That was Berkshire. My geography wasn’t up to much – how could it be, when I spent so much time immobilised? I loved maps, but was vague about how they connected up with the larger world of which I had seen so little.

  Later I worked things out to my own satisfaction. Everyone knew that the Queen lived in Buckingham Palace, so the link between royalty and Buckinghamshire was fundamental. It was unnecessary to spell it out any further. Leave that sort of crudity to the desperate parvenu that was Berkshire.

  Whichever was the Royal County as between Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, I also realised that the two addresses of CRX, one in each county, allowed it an indeterminate status. In a republican mood, I could use one return address, but on days when I thought the Queen was really rather pretty I could be gracious and use the other.

  Re-entering the notepaper debate, I asked, ‘Shouldn’t “Bucks” at least be “Buckinghamshire”?’ Mum said it was important not to show off when it came to printed notepaper. Not that it would be wrong to put in the full name of the county, but if she did that there would be too many letters in the word and then she wouldn’t be able to have her ‘Little House’.

  I asked her why she didn’t ask to have it printed like this:

  Trees,

  Abbotsbrook,

  Bourne End

  Buckinghamshire

  I liked a nice justified left-hand margin – and then Mum could have the county spelled out in full.

  ‘Jay-Jayee …’ Mum said, and I was happy to see that she was in a tender mood. When she was like that it was wonderful. I could forgive her any mistake in the world, and I was more than happy to fight against the whole suburban world if that was what she had wanted me to do.

  ‘Jay-Jayee,’ she said again, with a playful smile curling up one side of her mouth, ‘I don’t think you’ve been listening to a single word I’ve been sayee-ing, have you? Take another look at the notepaper. Can’t you see Mum’s Little House?’

  We seemed to be playing some sort of game, which was good, but however hard I looked at the subtle eggshell paper with its bold blue printing, I couldn’t see anything which resembled a ‘Little House’. I knew the secret was right in front of me, a thrilling feeling. The Queen’s Velvet watermark was winking at me invisibly. I didn’t need to hold the paper up to the light to see it. I knew it was there, and there was something else there too, just waiting to be seen. I was on the brink of great things, but I couldn’t see a Little House anywhere.

  ‘All right, Jay,’ she said. ‘Let’s tackle this from a different angle. Now let’s see. Take a piece of paper and draw me a little house.’ I hoped she was going to give me a sheet of notepaper to do my drawing on, but art work was never my strong point and I couldn’t blame her for being thrifty. She tore a sheet off an ordinary white notepad, but then she handed me her Parker fountain pen filled with blue Quink, which made me feel that this drawing would be special after all.

  Chemical storms

  I felt honoured because Mum had always drilled into me that fountain pens adapt to the writer’s hand. You should never write with a pen that belonged to somebody else, and you should certainly never lend yours to anybody.

  Taking the sacrosanct pen I drew a little box, put in two windows and a door, and topped it with a roof. I added a chimney with smoke coming out. For me a house without a chimney hardly counted as a human habitation. People need smoke – it’s a mystical given. ‘Very good!’ said Mum. I looked at my little house which was very good, apparently, if not quite good enough to deserve the Queen’s Velvet in her Historic County of Buckinghamshire. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘take away the walls, windows and doors and tell me what’s left!’ I couldn’t exactly take those bits away, so I shifted the paper and made a few more quick Parker strokes. I said, ‘It leaves a roof and a chimney with smoke coming out.’

  I still couldn’t see anything in Mum’s headed notepaper like this pictogram, so I screwed up my eyebrows and scratched my head with my stick. Mum’s puzzle was turning out to be quite a poser. Perhaps I’d under-estimated her brains. To give myself more time to think, I popped open the tube in which I kept my Liquorice Allsorts and flipped one up into my mouth. My aim was much improved by this time, practically perfect.

  Mum gave me an encouraging smile. ‘Try looking at h
ow the telephone number is done,’ she said, so I had another good hard look. On the left of the page I read:

  Bourne End 1176

  though it didn’t look like that at all. It wasn’t horizontal. It sloped as steeply as the corridor at CRX just by the main entrance. If that ‘Bourne End 1176’ was part of the Queen’s Highway in the Historic County there would be a sign before it bearing a giant exclamation mark and the words CAUTION / STEEP HILL / 1:3.

  If Dad was driving up that hill he would pray that it was a good dry day and that the Vauxhall had a decent amount of tread on its tyres. He would give the throttle all he’d got even before he reached the ‘B’, and then he just might make it to the ‘6’ at the end of the ramp, pointing all the way up to the moon. The blood was pounding in my ears as I imagined the scene and I felt almost faint.

  The telephone number sloped upwards like this: /, and the way Mum had the address printed out made an imaginary line sloping like this: . When when you put them together you saw something like this: /.

  Bingo Jai-Jaiya Hallelujah and Allah-Be-Praised! I had seen the roof of the little house at last. My imagination must have been severely inflamed, because for a moment I could see an imaginary chimney and imaginary smoke coming out too. I was incoherent with excitement for a good ten minutes. Mum was pleased to have made a convert but still rather taken aback. I seemed to be even more obsessed about the importance of the right stationery than she was. I told her that we must get the house notepaper redesigned. After the present batch had run out, we were going to have the address done just the way she had it, but with one vital addition – a printed housetop with a chimney, and smoke coming out of it.

  I wanted to start writing letters there and then to all and sundry, so as to use up the old stock of notepaper, now obsolete. At that moment I felt I could write letters tirelessly all day, until there was no paper left. ‘Let’s starting writing lots of letters, Mum!’ Good though her mood was, Mum wasn’t going to indulge me any further. ‘Don’t be silly, JJ,’ she said. ‘I’ve got my notepaper just the way I want it. And it’s not cheap. It’s not for wasting on letters that aren’t important.’ She wouldn’t let me use so much as one piece, and this threw me into a stark depression.

  She took back her Parker pen, as if she regretted breaking her own rules by letting me touch it, boxed up the Queen’s Velvet and put everything away. The only consolation for me was that she tucked my very ordinary sketch, done on very ordinary white paper, into the box as well.

  I felt completely exhausted after all the stationery excitement. My moods went wildly up and down. Emotions fizzed like sherbet on my tongue and then tasted of ashes. At the time I thought that childhood was like this for everyone. One more reason to wish for it to be over, although another part of me was terrified of growing up. I wished there was a way to stop being a child that didn’t involve becoming a grown-up.

  Moods are complex constructions, chemical storms. Part of that chemistry was to do with sugar intoxication from my Liquorice Allsorts. A child’s metabolism is finely balanced, easily knocked off its kilter. The tube from which I shook them was involved. It was a metal screw-top Smith Kline & French tube passed on to me by Mum or Muzzie. It was much harder to open, and much more satisfying, than the packet they had originally come in.

  I didn’t pay any attention to what had been in those tubes before. It was something prescribed without a murmur, after all, to anyone who was feeling a bit run down, a popular general pick-me-up. A standard tonic – Muzzie called it ‘petrol for the nerves’. It was benzedrine, racemic amphetamine, and the powdered residue from the tablets had settled on my Bassett’s Liquorice Allsorts, dusting each one with a stimulant coating. That was why I so often chattered nonsense at a terrific rate, and then felt sullenly exhausted. No wonder my mood would lift off like a rocket and come down like a stick. Muzzie, Mum and I were all on speed. In that sense we were all upper people.

  Forces both inside and outside me seemed to push me towards a new and alarming stage of life. My taily was whispering in my ear, telling me secrets deeper than anything Charlie knew. It was pointing the way into the future, with a slight leftward slant. When everyone in the ward was on rest time taily showed me how to enter a heavenly and forbidden world. When I manœuvred a cold pillow between my legs and pressed taily against the cool flaxcloth, it showed me how to be a player in a silent orchestra.

  I had never seen a man’s taily, and could only imagine what such a thing would look like. There seemed no likelihood that it would match mine in any respect. At CRX there was little opportunity for groin-watching. The staff were mainly female, and the men I saw, whether doctors or porters, wore white coats or overalls. It was at weekends in Bourne End that I could look more closely at the middle parts of men.

  A warm tie pointing upwards

  What I liked best of everything I saw was pressed black trousers. I loved the neat seam running through the middle of the shapely lump. I thought the taily would be equally neat and pressed and cloth-like. More like a warm tie pointing upwards than anything made of flesh.

  The beautiful young men in my fantasies were still the ones I had admired with Mary. I’d been faithful. They were the ones from the Famous Five: Julian for preference. I imagined him asking me along on an adventure, to a cave or some such place. Then he would send the others (including Timmy the dog) out on a recce. Julian would clear his throat and say, pretending calm, ‘You know why I sent the others away, don’t you?’

  My heart hammering, I’d say, ‘To uncover the mystery?’

  He’d smile as he opened his arms and legs to me at last. ‘The only mystery here is you and me …’ I had Dick in reserve for when Julian’s aura was exhausted. In third place, as emergency fetish, Rollo the gipsy from the Rupert annuals. The gipsies, oh. The raggle-taggle.

  My loyalty to old friends might seem rather pitiful, as if I was hallucinating on vanilla ice cream in the absence of stronger stuff. It’s true that like everyone else in the 1950s I wasn’t exactly bombarded with sexually inviting images, but this line of thinking doesn’t do justice to my imagination, or to Enid Blyton’s either. I wasn’t surprised when I read up on her later, to find that the Queen Bee was a rather racy figure in her own way. Tennis parties in the nude and so on. I don’t think she was actively beaming arousing thoughts down the hill to me from where she lived, but she was a livelier figure than she has been given credit for. Her characters were bound to reflect that sensuality, once she left Andy Pandy and Big Ears in the nursery and started writing more freely about the Famous Five.

  Masturbation corrupted my character, but only incidentally. It wasn’t the act itself, but the extremes I had to go to in order to practise it undisturbed. I didn’t even do tuppenny in private, so how was I going to talk to taily without eavesdroppers? Rest time was an oasis only in theory. Now we were older none of us did more than doze, and I had the feeling of female ears tuning in to every little move. The solution was to break the rules. Only if I misbehaved seriously and often would I be exiled to a side ward, where I would have the leisure to explore taily properly.

  I had to learn taily’s language. Masturbation for me has to come from the shoulder, apart from the odd finger-flick. More satisfying, usually, since my hips could generate virtually nothing in the way of thrust, was to hold the sheet against myself. I learned to excite myself without actual touch, using a stream of charged images to urge myself on to the dry lightning, the thrilling discharge of nothing yet. Thanks to Ansell, the electrical storms of pre-adolescence were provoked by contact with the finest Irish linen.

  It was a different sort of sin against those linen sheets that most often got me banished to a side ward in the first place. Early on in my time at CRX I had learned that linen was more or less edible. I could suck a patch until it went soft and then chew a bit off. Then I’d spit it at the wall to see if anyone noticed. Paper was also useful for this purpose. First I chewed it to soggy pap and then spat it at the wall. Once it had dried, it
stayed stuck there remarkably firmly. But linen was my spitting material of choice. It’s a paradoxical textile, resistant to high temperatures but vulnerable to friction and nibbling. I have to admit there was an addictive aspect to my bad habit. I was drawn to those sheets like a moth to a flame, like a moth to a winter woollie. The staff might not notice the spat-out whitish lumplets on the wall, but they could hardly miss the nibbled edges of the sheets. I hope that Ansell never knew how I insulted the luxury textile that she insisted we have, a two-pronged assault with teeth and taily.

  Later on in my school career I learned that I wasn’t alone in the animal kingdom – weaver birds, house martins, ants and termites all used the same technique. By then I had grown out of my vice, but I felt retrospectively vindicated. I wasn’t such a masticatory anomaly as I had seemed to myself and others. I may even have been inspired by my budgie in the first place. Charlie was a dab hand at chewing things, including cloth and paper. On one famous occasion he had made short work of a ten-shilling note Dad had left unattended, chewing it into little balls of brownish pulp. It was a tremendous feat, on a par with a human being chewing up (and spitting out) the Bayeux Tapestry, but Dad didn’t appreciate it.

  By this time I knew the rules of CRX. When my body became a man’s, or at least stopped being a boy’s, I would be moved to Ward Three. The prospect terrified me. It wasn’t that I loved the girls on Ward One, but I had decided I didn’t like boys either. I had overheard a nurse saying, ‘They’re all Teddy boys in there.’ Mr Turpin the headmaster was the form teacher of Ward Three, and I didn’t mind him, but he didn’t sleep on the ward. I knew because I asked him, and he said he went home to Mrs Turpin. Teddy boys were exactly as terrifying as teddy bears were wonderful. Teddy boys were wild. They came out at night. How could Old Turps protect me then? I decided I would be better off staying where I was.